What is a "sleep habit" or a "sleep onset association"?
Whether we're children or adults, we actually all have habits when we sleep. Let me talk about adults quickly and then I'll relate it to children. As adults, when we're serious about going to sleep we may have a favourite position that we adopt; we may take our pillow and do something with it, we may have a habit that we always use when we're serious about falling asleep. That's for why some people, when they go to sleepovers, to a hotel, or they're sleeping overnight somewhere and don't have their favourite pillow, it's just not right; it's harder for them to fall asleep because it's not what they're used to. So, in essence, we all have something we're used to; now children are the same and we call these habits, these things that we're used to, 'sleep onset associations'; we always associate something with going to sleep. The habit could be whatever the child is used to, for instance if the baby is used to sleeping with a parent and going to sleep with a parent, then that becomes the habit and they cannot fall asleep without that. If they're used to having a pacifier, if they're used to having their teddy bear, if they're used to having music played or the TV on, or a combination of all of those things. Some of them can be really complex. You can have a parent have to lie with you and you may have to drink a bottle, you may have to have music, you may have to have a teddy bear, you may have to have a blanket, you may have to have the TV on as well, and these things all become entrenched as habits. Now, it's important to understand that when we go back to these sleep patterns, when we go through our sleep patterns and we move from a deep state of sleep to a light state of sleep, we all naturally have moments where we wake up spontaneously. It's normal; it's normal to wake up in the night, it's just part of our sleep pattern. The question is, depending on our habit, when we wake up naturally in the middle of the night, for most of us as adults, we kind of may roll over, we may move the pillow, we may do something again, or we may kind of recreate the habit that we had when we went to sleep initially and we put ourselves back to sleep. Now for a child, if their sleep habit is say drinking a bottle or nursing, or having the TV on, and they wake up naturally (which can happen multiple times in the night), they wake up and they see that Mummy's not with them anymore, and where's the bottle that they were used to? They actually cannot put themselves back to sleep without having those additional sleep onset associations, and so that's when it can become a problem, because when naturally waking up in the night, the child is unable to put themselves back to sleep because they don't have all of those additional, peripheral things which they were used to.
